If you’ve logged into your account recently you may have noticed a new report we’ve recently put live called “Custom parameters”. This report is designed to give you a much deeper level of reporting granularity through the use of up to three custom parameters which you as a partner can define.
In order to begin using this report effectively you need to ensure that and Kelkoo URLs from ECS or from our feed going to a retailer offer includes the custom parameter.
Some examples of what a custom parameter could be:
Example 1: an SEM campaign ID
Example 2: a search term entered by a user
Example 3: a referrer URL
The maximum lengths of custom parameters vary, for example custom1 can accept larger values, particular useful for URLs (up to 511 characters in length). Custom2 & custom3 both have maximums of 127. Please adhere to these maximums if you want to be confident in meaningful reporting as anything larger will be truncated.
When you are calling ECS in a live manner (ie not caching results) you can easily apply your chosen
custom parameters to your ECS query. All offer URLs in the ECS response will then be automatically
appended. For example:
Sample Query
/V3/productSearch?query=ipod&sort=default_ranking&start=1&results=20&show_products= 1&show_subcategories=1&show_refinements=1&aid=[YOUR_PARTNER_ID]&custom1=x&custom2=y &custom3=z
Sample Response
http://ecs-uk.kelkoo.co.uk/ctl/go/sitesearchGo?.ts=[TIMESTAMP].sig=[SIGNATURE]
&offerId=[OFFER_ID]&searchId=[SEARCH_ID]&affiliationId=[YOUR_PARTNER_ID]&country=uk
&wait=true&ecs=ok&contextLevel=1&merchantid=[MERCHANT_ID]&comId=[COMPANY_ID]&catId=
[CATEGORY_ID]&custom1=x&custom2=y&custom3=z
If you choose to cache your ECS results you can still take advantage of custom parameters but it
doesn’t make sense that you would want to apply a blanket set of parameters against all your cached
offers. In this instance you must apply the custom parameters of your choice directly to the offer URLs in
the ECS response. In order to do so without breaking the URL you must include the extra parameter
addedParams. For example:
Sample Response
http://ecs-uk.kelkoo.co.uk/ctl/go/sitesearchGo?.ts=[TIMESTAMP].sig=[SIGNATURE]
&offerId=[OFFER_ID]&searchId=[SEARCH_ID]&affiliationId=[YOUR_PARTNER_ID]&country=uk
&wait=true&ecs=ok&contextLevel=1&merchantid=[MERCHANT_ID]&comId=[COMPANY_ID]&catId=
[CATEGORY_ID]&addedParams=true&custom1=x&custom2=y&custom3=z
If you’re using the Kelkoo feed solution you follow the same procedure as “ECS – Cached offers” and
apply the custom parameters directly to the offer URLs in your feed, along with addedParams=true.